The image size limit has been raised to 1mb! Anything larger than that should be linked to. This is a HARD limit, please do not abuse it.

Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

Are you like me, tired of Hearthstone's RNG vomit?
Are you weary of both it and MtG's card rarity systems requiring players to pump tons of money into buying packs to find that one card?
Well have I got a game for you!

Netrunner is a Living Card Game (TM) and part of the Android franchise. Android takes place in a dystopian future where people fuck robots, Corps (corporations) rule the world, Androids and Clones provide slave labor, wreaking havoc on the working and middle class, and criminal hackers, called Runners, strike at the Corps for wealth, revenge, freedom, bragging rights, or in the name of SCIENCE!

Fantasy Flight Games provides an excellent and stylish tutorial about the flow of battle.

One player uses a Corp deck and one player uses a Runner deck. The corp must defend and score seven points worth of Agenda cards depicting corporate agendas that could be benevolent or sinister. The Runner has no Agenda cards of their own. They can only steal them from the Corp.

The runner snoops in and steals cards by performing attacks on the Corp's servers (card lanes) hand (HQ) or even their discard pile (Archives), called Runs. If a Run is successful, they get to look at one card, and if its an Agenda, its immediately theirs and they score the points instead.

So how can a Corp defend themselves from Runner attacks? ICE. ICE are defense card they lay in front of their lanes and cards face down, and when a Runner steps on them when they're running, the Corp can pay to activate them (rezzing.) They can cause light to severe effects upon the Runner if the runner doesn't have the right kind of Icebreaker. Here are an example of a Corp's Ice and a Runner's Icebreaker. Yeah, these fights look like something out of SMT or Pokemon, but many more cards use the story, characters and setting of the Android universe very well. I keep the story text in all all my packs and expansions.

If all match play like this, they would be slow. The Corp could also always Tag and then murder (flatline) the runner before they have chance to score seven points. The runner's hand (Grip) is also their health, and for each damage they suffer, they must discard a random card of the Corp's choice. Brain Damage is the worst damage, permanently reducing the Runner's hand size.

The game is one of Fantasy Flight Games' Living Card Games. LCGs cast off MtG, Yugioh and Pokemon's revenue strategy by doing away with lots of little mystery packs, forcing consumers to dump money into packs so they can make that one deck with that one card. All pack and expansion content is laid bare for consumers to purchase only what they want to make the deck they want. Cards are sold in a Core box, Expansions and Data Packs. The Core Box and Expansions are permanent and will never rotate out. Data packs will slowly begin to rotate out Spring 2017.

There are four Corp factions and three Runner factions.
Haas-Bioriod: Effective. Reliable. Humane.
The corporation that started it all, HB was the first to create true artificial intelligence and the Bioroids of the future via their brain mapping technology. Bioroids have replaced law enforcement, emergency services, manual labor, and even prostitution, via their Adam and Eve bots. Mmmm . However, this wreaked havoc on the lower classes, who were now out of jobs. They also have Brain Banks that allow people to upload and download backups of their own brains. Their slogan is a direct jab at their primary rival in syntheic slave labor...

Jinteki: When you need the human touch.
Jinteki is a traditional, conservative zaibatsu that specializes in clones, rather than machines, while working on medicine on the side. Clones, like HB's bioroids, have no rights. Their Ice is weeabo as shit, taking on the forms of Yokai and Shinto deities. Do you like Trap Cards and Secrets and all that other bullshit? Jinteki's got traps for days.

NBN: Someone is always watching.
What does NBN stand for? Nobody knows anymore! Everyone just calls it NBN, and it is has conquered all news, media and entertainment. Their eyes are everywhere.

The Weyland Consortium: Moving Upwards
Weyland is the reason humanity is expanding beyond the stars. Their crowning jewel is The Beanstalk a massive elevator that connects Earth from the stars. Weyland conquers construction, mining, and war. They also specialize in acquiring other companies. By force if necessary.

Who would dare stand up to such noble captains of industry? Runners of course!

Anarchs
Anarchists. Freedom Fighters. Revolutionaries. Disgruntled robot killers. Some genuinely work to the betterment of the middle and working class. Others are anti-bioroid activists destroying robots for taking their jerbs. Some just want to burn the world to the ground. They specialize in Virus cards, and destroying Corp cards.

Criminals
Mobsters. Spies. Mercenaries. Honeypots. Escaped clones. These folks are in it only for themselves, caring not for the politics of the Anarchs or the ideals of the Shapers.

Shapers
Tinkers. Scholars. Artists. Lotus flower lovin' hippies. Gifted-but-disturbed children. They are accused of being naive by the other Runners. They attack Corps for odd reasons. Just to see if they can, for art, for science, for fun. Maybe even a splash of spirituality. Kit here will have none of HB's "robots are more humane than clones" rubbish. She believes all artificial intelligence is as alive as she is! They specialize in slowly pumping up big, fat Icebreakers for crashing through layer after layer of Ice.

They are:
Average but somewhat too slow - Sunny (and the existence of Breaking News/All-Seeing-I means she's actually not great against the slower tagging decks around nowadays you'd think she'd be great against).
Good to awful depending on the corp meta - Adam (who just implodes against asset spam and tagging).
Garbage - Apex (not being able to play non-virtual resources is a huge downside considering what most of the good neutral cards are).

None of them really have enough of their own cards to make a really solid deck - 25 influence isn't enough when you need to import everything.

Sucker Smoke isn't an option right? Ice Carver, Net Ready, and hope you can scrap together 2 credits with Net Mercur or whatever when you need them for the new basically fixie stealth suite? (Ugh, 3 for Blackstone? That's so unplayable).

New auto recurring decoder does not seem like the most efficient breaker ever released.

I'll be very curious, because I'm not convinced there's a situation where Khan will actually be the right choice. She seems to be overdesigned to not be Kate or as powerful as Kate became. She essentially IS Kate, but with a watered down ability made to be hugely specific, and no link, and less influence, in exchange for a 40 card deck. Her breakers aren't exactly efficient and are definitely not cheap to throw down, are based around a gimmick that works better playing London Library than Khan herself, and pretty much require you to already be winning to pan out. From the ground up she just seems like incredibly tepid design with numbers that are beyond safe.
Anyway, prove me wrong, man. You know I want you to. But I'm not remotely convinced she's where she should have been. The Anarch breakers coming out alongside the birds is like salt in the wound.

I mean, is that an actual reasonable code gate breaker for Criminal? It starts at enough strength to break Enigma, pumps reasonably, breaks Turing/Enigma for 4, and then gives the option to bounce something big and annoying. 5 install cost is hard to swallow, but not that much worse than Gordian.

Hmm, new directive. I assume you can have essentially a "sideboard" of all four directives, and choose which three you want to start the game with. Not being forced to trash the first asset you access every turn vs asset spam seems like it would be really handy, and peeks at R&D are always useful.

I mean, is that an actual reasonable code gate breaker for Criminal? It starts at enough strength to break Enigma, pumps reasonably, breaks Turing/Enigma for 4, and then gives the option to bounce something big and annoying. 5 install cost is hard to swallow, but not that much worse than Gordian.

You know, I decided to do a thing because I could. My numbers should be double checked, but I'm pretty sure it's all there okay.
The summary numbers aren't hugely useful because it includes all ICE plus some variations you'll never see. It's harder to quantify the meta and how much you should expect to pay based on what you expect to see. But you can at least use this list to compare any set of Criminal decoders on any code gate.
Also, if there's something I haven't thought of people might want to see, let me know and I'll add it in.

Sucker Smoke isn't an option right? Ice Carver, Net Ready, and hope you can scrap together 2 credits with Net Mercur or whatever when you need them for the new basically fixie stealth suite? (Ugh, 3 for Blackstone? That's so unplayable).

the question, though, is when would you ever need to boost it

the only barrier with strength higher than 3 that anyone is playing right now is Eli

so yeah, if you're playing datasuckers in Smoke, I'd say you are 100% using Blackstone

of course, this is barring any Damon rulings which suggest it is possible to start playing a game of netrunner before a game of netrunner has started (which, frankly, is not outside the realm of possibility)

of course, this is barring any Damon rulings which suggest it is possible to start playing a game of netrunner before a game of netrunner has started (which, frankly, is not outside the realm of possibility)

Depends when "starts the game" is defined. Some might say it doesn't start until people are fully ready to play, have drawn opening hands and done any mulliganing. Which, if true, seems to be a very cool ability for Adam to have in choosing his directives.